I am glad that Bill did not have to go to work on March 25. We actually slept in till about 8am. I found out that my friend Betty Ann is in the hospital again. Her dead kidney keeps filling with fluid and she gets really really sick and has to to into the hospital till they can straighten it out. She always wants to go home and they let her go only to welcome her back the following week. Now they tell her that they want to put a stent in to help the fluid to get released...........I have no idea how that will come about because she is around 400 pounds and is not a good candidate for surgery of any kind. Her heart will not stand for any kind of anaesthetic so I wonder how they hope to accomplish this. The second and most ambitious approach is for them to put a tube in her abdomen, and vacuum the dead tissue out. I told her they might just put in a tiny vacuum cleaner to suck it out. She thought that was outrageous but I thought it was a creative solution to the problem.
On Tuesday 26th March I gave up on Zumba class and went to visit Betty Ann in the hospital and she looked like death warmed over and was wanting to go home. I was only there a few minutes when the nurse asked me to leave because they needed to do something with her.
I left and went over to Dorothy's home for Hidden Sitches applique group. Not too many of us do applique but we have a good time talking. Julie has a computer that died and she was wanting to know if it was possible for someone to retrieve her genealogy for her. She has not kept a backup because she says that the thumb drives are too expensive. Well, she just may have lost all her genealogy as a result. Perhaps some guru somewhere will be able to come up with a solution for her but it is beyond me.
When I went out to start the car to go home it would not start. So I went back into the house to tell the ladies of my plight and to call Bill , who was at work, to ask him what to do. I called AAA and they said that Bill had to be present to sign the papers for the roadside service because my name was not on the contract. Well, to put my name on the contract will cost a bundle so that was out. So I called the Ameriprise people who are the insurers of the car and who offer roadside service. In the end, the tow truck came and he put a little gadget on the battery and the car started right off - the battery had died. Well I got to ride in the cab of the big tow truck with our little car looking a sorry sight on the back - chained down like a criminal and there certainly was no way it was going to bolt from the back of that tow truck. We drove over to the Nissan dealership and they put in a new battery to the tune of $135 (I think Bill must have been bleeding from every pore - he usually goes to Walmart and buys a cheap battery - certainly not the $135 variety). So the car started up right away and I went home.
On Wed March 27 I went walking in the morning. I do not like the wimpy teacher they have at the YMCA water aerobics class on Wednesday. She does not put her heart and soul into teaching or leading the group and so I do not feel like I get much challenge out of the class.
At 10.15am I was interviewed for 2 hours by a student from Northern Arizona University for her journalism class. She first asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed about my quilt that is on display at the Sharlot Hall Museum and I said yes. Turns out, she is the daughter of the lady who lives on Barmar Street who walks the massive Great Dane around our neighborhood.
At 1pm I went to Beading group and then after dinner, we left for Yavapai College Performance hall to see Fiddler on the Roof. It was a wonderful performance.
Thursday 28th March, Bill was working 9-5 at Prescott Valley Store and I went to breakfast with Juli and Andrea at Golden Corral. I made it to Zumba class at 9.30am and then went to have a Lymphatic Massage - designed to help me feel better. Cina is my massage therapist and she does a wonderful job. At 5pm I went visiting teaching to all the ladies on the list. My companion works as a nurse and we can only go when she is off work (of course that follows suit doesn't it?). this time she had two of her little boys with her. At one house the youngest found the two pug dogs in their cages and they barked at him. He got a little frightened - he is about 18 months old. Just before we left this house, his mother wanted to see the dogs so she went into the room and he toddled after her. I was just behind him and the dogs barked and barked and he put his hands up for me to pick him up. Normally he will not go to anyone but his mother so I am privileged.
On Good Friday I went to Zumba class then did some shopping for food. In the afternoon we took the car over to Bealls for them to put the interior mud guard on the passenger side front wheel well. This cover came loose as we were on our way to rootstech and it flapped so bad that it fell off and is on the side of the road somewhere.
Saturday 30th March I went to Zumba class but did not stay the whole time. There was a substitute teacher and she does Hip Hop and I just don't do that. It is a ZUMBA class after all - you know? Spanish Music and all that stuff. So I went home and worked on my Sunday School lesson for my little kids.
Sunday 31st March I got up early and made resurrection rolls for the kids snack in Primary. You take refrigerator rolls, open them out and put a big marshmallow in the middle (representing Christ laid in the tomb) and then bake them and the marshmallow disappears signifying that there is no body in the tomb because Christ was resurrected. I made 16 rolls because I was not sure how many extra kids we might have over the holiday, visiting family here. No extra's came so the kids had a field day polishing off the Resurrection rolls. Jacob ate 5 - his and some other child's rolls.
We called Pam in Australia to wish her happy Easter and to tell her that we are planning on going to Australia next year for her 80th Birthday. I also called Uncle Ivan to wish him happy birthday - I really thought it was 2nd April but it is 15th April so I told him that this was his happy birthday phone call anyway.
Monday 1st April Bill had to work in Prescott Valley Safeway. I went and had a blood test ready for my doctor visit next week. On the internet Alex Anderson, a national quilt teacher, played an April Fools day joke on us. She demonstrated a "Quilt Stitch UnStitcher " program that she said was an app for Iphone. she even had a techhie person explain how the program worked. She stitched a pattern and then did the UnStitcher program and at the end she said it was a marvelous tool and then the banner popped up "April Fools". It was funny to see. I spent most of the day cleaning up the house.
Tuesday 2nd April Bill was called in to work in Cottonwood and he went very early in the morning and did not come home until after 11pm. So before and after Zumba class I was chained to the computer doing the matching that comes from My Heritage.com. I find that I have 29,000 matches to inspect.....the crazy thing about it is that I only have 18,000 or so people in my database. The reason there are so many matches to be made is that there is a lot of overlap and a lot of people are researching the same names so there is a lot of duplication as I go through and check the names etc. I have been able to correct a lot of people's work. One lady who is also tracking TROST names has them from Pinnow in the Pfalz district when in fact they are from the opposite side of the country. It seems that in Germany there are a number of towns named Pinnow and so she just glommed onto one and put it in her record...................I guess she never obtained any certificates or checked any records.
Wednesday morning I went walking on the Rails to Trail at the Peavine Trail. The lake is FULL - they have not released the lake water into the Recharge area for the aquifer so there is lots of water in the lake and lots of waterfowl. I took my camera and took lots of pictures and I took our little binoculars and watched the birds. I am not a birdwatcher by any stroke of the imagination, but I do like to see the birds up close and our little gadget allows just that. There were a few 'serious' birdwatchers out and really SERIOUS photographers out taking pictures of the birds on the lake. I was hoping to see the Blue Heron that sometimes is in the shallows but it was not there while I was walking. Lots of joggers, dog walkers and others ambling along the trail. Wednesday is the FREE day - the other days you have to pay $2 to go walking on the trail. I think we pay enough in taxes already so I only go walking on the Peavine on Wednesdays.
Today is Thursday 4th April 2013 and I went to breakfast with Juli and Andrea. We talk of all sorts of things and share news of our families and their doings. After breakfast, I went to the health food store and bought some Xylitol since I cannot have sugar at all and I just cannot bring myself to eat oatmeal plain..............ugh. I went over to Zumba and it was a good class today. When I came home I saw that the Spring Clean up people had not been by to pick up the junk I put in front of our house for cleanup day. A few things have been taken by the scavengers and that makes it less for the spring clean up people to load into the truck and haul away.
I decided to take the rest of the stuff from the shed by the side of the house and get rid of it. Some things have been there since we moved here in Sept. of 1999 and I guess if we have not made use of it by now, it will not be needed in the next 24 hours either. I had to move the 'grow boxes' that I use for growing the tomatoes etc. and so I thought I would take them and put them in the raised bed ready to be filled with potting soil.
Now here comes the story .........................
Some time ago I heard some sort of animal chewing up our house. We had a similar thing happen in Pennsylvania and had the exterminator come in and it did no good - they were still getting in and chewing up the house. We moved! to Arizona! and now I hear someone chewing our house. How did they find us here? did it take the animal all these years to make the trek across the country to come and bother us?
Well, last week I asked the workers next door what to do about a pack rat and they suggested some sort of poison to be put out so I went and purchased that. I put one pack out and it was gone the next day - guess it tasted good. This pack rat had chewed up my mop and we found the shredded mop pieces under the side of the house where it had chewed the wall. We removed the sorry pieces of mop and put them in the trash. Just for good measure I put down another bait tray but it did not get eaten as I had expected - did not know how many pack rats we were catering for! the chewing stopped and I was happy, that is, I was happy until this day around lunch time after I came home from Zumba.
I cleaned out the shed area and took the junk to the curb and then decided to put out my grow boxes. I took out the extraneous stuff that had collected in the top one and discovered to my horror that some animal had chewed up the inner earth holder. I picked up the first grow box and saw that the critter had eaten a hole right through the bottom of the box, thus making it useless to me. The box when set up holds 4 gallons of water in the reservoir and you only have to water the plants every other day. So I pulled out the first box and saw that the second box also had evidence of being chewed through both the inner screen and the bottom, making it also useless to me. I pulled out the second box and to my amazement, there was the pack rat - dead as a doornail and a lot of the poison pellets in the bottom of the third grow box and evidence that he had chewed through both parts of that box as well. So I went inside and got two plastic shopping bags and put my hand inside and used the outside to grasp the dead creature and put him in the trash. What an ignominious way to die? He had been greedy and eaten quite a bit of the bait and was storing the rest of it in the bottom of the grow box. Perhaps he hoped to eat the rest later? There was no LATER! So I put the damaged grow boxes out on the curb
and they are now in the landfill somewhere.
So all told this pack rat cost me $4.98 for bait and $105 to replace the three grow boxes he chewed up.
After lunch, I went to see Dr. Ham and he said he could do the laser surgery for me to help me see better out of my left eye so it will be done on April 30. I walked over to the Family History Center and spent from 2 pm to 6pm in the center - Bill and I are on the staff again.
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